"Dean Ing - Sam and the Sudden Blizzard Machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

help. I wanted to help Sam when he announced that he was building a surprise
entry. I should've saved my breath.

The appointed Saturday dawned with a knifing chill in the clear sky. Snowballs
flurried between early arrivals at the quarry. I checked off the conical
pylons, fire extinguishers, doctor, and timing equipment, wishing we had
attracted some racing journalists. The man from the local Bugle was worse than
nothing; but him we had, like it or not. I fought the temptation to steal his
hat for a pylon. It was already the right shape.

Scanning the entry list, I could see our first mistake was the lack of ground
rules. Several guys used open propellers, one of 'em a front mounted rig that
nearly blew the driver off while it was idling. He got chilblains and became
an instant spectator. Another theorist put six little tires across the rear
axle to get more adhesion. It worked fine on firm snow, but at the technical
inspection, he gunned it and his wheels hungrily chewed a hole two-feet deep.
Of course, it dropped backward into the hole like a sounding whale and killed
the engine and caught fire, with the usual result. We buried the hulk under a
pile of slush and went on with tech inspection.
Sam's pickup eased up the access road with a towering, tarp-shrouded lump
looming over its cab. Everything got very quiet. Sam had refused us even the
slightest peek at his secretive entry. Small wonder.

With his usual stolid care, Sam flipped back the tarpaulin and revealed most
of his special. One of the tech inspectors screamed, saving me the trouble.

To being with, the-thing-broke all the rules or, rather, the assumptions.
Everybody but Sam used heavy frames, sand filled tubes, bags of birdshot, or
Corvette body parts to add weight. Sam had a gossamer birdcage frame of
aluminum wrapped with quartz fiber tape. For a maniacal moment I wondered if
he'd crocheted it.

Everybody with wheels used fat little studded tires, but Sam's wheel was two
and a half
meters high. Towering between a rear pair of ski runners was a single
viciously cleated monstrosity of magnesium, like a kulak's ferris wheel a half
a meter wide. It was mounted on an axle held by that spidery tubing frame.
Nearly everybody had cart engines mounted near the wheels. Sam used a
turbine powered by a liquid that he handled with something very like
terror-and Sam crimps dynamite caps with his teeth. The turbine wasn't near
the wheel; it was inside! Sam had bolted it to the nonrotating axle within his
hellish great wheel.
If I forgot the gear teeth around the inside of the wheel, forgive me. A
simple drive gear transmitted the turbine's torque to the big wheel. Studying
the gear ratio, I calculated that the monster wouldn't be very quick. To be
competitive, the turbine would have to run at over 50,000 rpm. Later, Sam told
me his little aerospace fugitive didn't run well at 50,000. It ran much better
at 500.
Thousand. Which partly explains-but I'm getting ahead of myself.
The steering mechanism was a disappointment at first (and to me, a